Cold Cold Heart
by Echante
Summary: When Addison commits suicide, Mark doesn't know what to do with his life. Mark/Lexie, Mark/Addison


A/N: Okay, here's the deal, I want everyone to stop hating on Shonda. I know I'm guilty of it too but I'm trying to stop. Think of it this way, whenever you write a story, and someone hates on it, it **pisses** you off, so we should try to extend the courtesy to her. There are a lot of angry people out there and she can't please them all. Anyway. Thanks.

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**Cold, Cold Heart**

_Another love before my time,_

_Made your heart sad an' blue._

He left Addison in L.A. with growing uneasiness. He didn't recognize her this time, he used to be able to read her so easily but he couldn't. They've both morphed into different versions of themselves and it scared the shit out of him. So he left. He fled the scene. He thought he did it without looking back, but sometimes his heart jolts and he conjures the final scene that was their undoing. He recalls the split-second of heart-break that she allowed him to see. And every time, he winces in pain.

The telephone rings, and he thrusts a random arm into the air to try and silence it. Lexie giggles softly to herself and jumps out of bed to pick it up. Mark rolls over and groans, burying his head into the pillow. "Hello?" She smiles brightly into the phone as Mark tries desperately to wiggle out of the covers.

"Ma…Mark?" Is the stammered words that come from the other line.

Lexie frowns and tells her, "No, hang on one-sec, I'll go get him." She covers the receiver with her hand and yells, "Mark! It's for you!"

"Hang on!" He yells back, struggling into sweat-pants.

When he finally manages to get to the phone all he can hear is the dial-tone. He frowns and checks the caller-id that reads 'Addison.' He shrugs and dials back but she doesn't pick up so he figures it wasn't important.

Two-days later he gets a call from Naomi, telling him to come to the funeral, Addison had committed suicide.

_ He figured that life was pointless, so he might as well end it. As he sat atop the suspended bridge, watching the water crash below him and into the rocks, he allowed himself the perverse pleasure of imagining their reactions. He would no longer be known as the shallow manwhore; people would wonder what plagued him; they'd wonder how they'd never noticed that he had been so tortured. _

_He didn't matter, not really, he was insignificant. So he sighed and braced himself, getting ready to jump, when all of the sudden a hand wrapped itself around his arm and a voice cried out, "Wait!"_

_ He'd turned astonished and exasperated. His grey-blue eyes squinted to meet pale-green ones. He recognized her, they'd met at a bar once and fucked in the bathroom and then never talked again. She was controlling, she was a fire-crotch, but he had liked her for the brief hour that they were acquainted. _

_ Her steady gaze met his wavering one and she swung her legs over the edge of the bridge and settled herself next to him. "Death," she informed him, "Isn't something you'll have time to regret."_

_ "I know," he said gruffly and she turned his head towards her, guiding his face with a soft hand._

_ "If you jump, I'll jump." She shrugs and whispers at him and he looks at her concerned._

_ "You shouldn't do that." He tells her softly but she shrugs again and looks back at him intently._

_ He sighed and hesitated, taking one look back over the water's edge and then, finally, he relented. He swung his legs back over the barrier until he was standing back on steady ground and she nodded grimly as they slid down and settled, cross-legged, on the dirt road. _

_ "It's different when you have two lives in your hands," she tells him smiling, "But call me up if you ever try to do that again."_

_ There was a soft rain that drizzled downward and made tiny popping noises against the gravel in front of them, but he took her mouth into his and bit back his misery as they kissed, again and again in the rain until the pain subsided and the numbness took him. Then she smiled at him and stood up, offering him a hand and pulling him up, "Promise me you'll call me if you do feel the need to decimate yourself."_

_ He laughed at how light she could make the situation and she shook her head at him, "I'd be happy to die with you Mark Sloan," she told him. _

_ He grinned and then added to the pact, because he figured he recognized the same destructive tendencies in her as well, and a part of him knew that she'd contemplated death before, "Then promise me we'll die together," he racked his mind for a name and then smiled when he remembered, "Addison Montgomery."_

_ She quirked an eye-brow and crinkled her eyes and pretended she was deep in thought but then her face cleared and she laughed a brilliant, full laugh and spat into her hand, surprising him, "Shake on it." She told him, so he mirrored her movements and they shook, and then hand-in-hand, they walked back to their college campus. _

The flight to Los Angeles is silent. He sits next to Derek and across the aisle from Callie and Arizona. Richard sits behind him and Miranda's head is sobbing quietly on the Chief's shoulder. The funeral dismantled the hospital, and only those who insisted on going were allowed the time off. Derek had attempted to talk to him before take-off; he'd made a casual comment about how tragic it all was and Mark couldn't face him. He had the strongest urge to just punch him in the face and yell at him about how this isn't something trivial, this isn't an occasion for him to throw on a sad face and disappear into. Addison is dead. Addison isn't coming back.

He refuses to look at the open casket, instead settling himself into a quiet corner towards the back and staring at his intertwined fingers. Callie joins him and he thinks she maybe understands because she doesn't say a word but concentrates on the tears spilling from her own eyes and the gentle spasms that contort her face as she lets out her grief.

"I don't want to look," he tells her, tears spilling from his eyes and his head shaking back and forth, "I don't want to see her dead… she's not dead…"

Callie takes his hand in hers and allows him to cry against her shoulder as she whispers, "I know, shhh, I know…"

"She was so full of life…" his words are muffled by Callie's shoulder but he doesn't care, he keeps spewing them, "so full of life… this is my fault… this is all my fault."

"No," Callie chokes back her own sob, knowing that her friend's grief ran deeper than her own, "No it was not."

"She called me, I should have picked up the phone, I shouldn't have let Lexie get it…"

"Hey, there's no way you would have known that, there's no way."

"She promised we would die together! She promised me…" he's falling apart and he doesn't even care, "She promised me, she promised me."

She runs out of condolences so she settles into her own despair and allows him to just cry, soaking the sleeves of her t-shirt. She's too lost to notice that he's gotten up and charged with mad determination towards the direction of Addison's parent's. He's intercepted by an usher and it takes three of them to subdue him, but he shakes his fist and yells at them, "This is on you! You killed her! You killed her!"

He doesn't know what has happened until he finds himself flat on his ass outside of the church, and he just lies there, allowing the grass stains to soak into his tux and the blaring sun to burn his face.

He drinks a whole bottle of vodka on the three hour flight back, and refuses to speak to his girlfriend when she picks him up at the airport. He passes out on the kitchen table and lies there all night. He doesn't go to work the next morning.

_ She calls him, four a.m., and he came over because that's what he did when she asked. She looked at him with drunken eyes and smiled demonically up at him and smashed a bottle of wine against the leg of a chair. She glaces back at him, the bottle head grasped shakily in her hand and the sharp shard of glass pressed to her neck. "You want to die today?" She asked him._

_ He sat next to her, he wasn't going to argue with her, he wasn't going to try and stop her. Instead he picked up a piece of glass and positions it right above his wrist. "If you go," he whispered as he kissed her forehead, "If you go, I'll go. That's the deal. I mean to keep it."_

_ Her smile wavered at that and the impromptu knife in her hand faltered before it fell, and she flung herself into his arms crying. He winced when the glass in his hand accidentally slashed through her cheek but she doesn't notice. _

_ He captured her arms as they started to surround his neck and he pulled her up so he could see her face. "Hey honey," he whispered soothingly, "you're going to need some stitches, does Derek have a suture kit?"_

_ "Leave it," she mumbled nastily, angry at him for mentioning Derek._

_ He offered her a small smile, "I can't let such a pretty face be scarred forever, it'll take two seconds, and then we can do whatever you want."_

_ She kissed him the minute he finished and that time, he let her._

Derek doesn't bother knocking; he knows that Mark hasn't responded to anyone in the last few days. Lexie hustles in and out of the apartment, scared shitless and trying not to evoke him. He hasn't said a word since he came back from L.A. He hasn't been sober either.

"Hey." Derek says, putting a six-pack of ginger-ale on the counter, hoping that he'll drink it instead of bourbon. He looks over at him passively and shakes his head, wincing at the pain.

"Mark," Derek opens a can and tries to hand it to him, he shakes his head again, "Mark," Derek repeats, "You can't do this to yourself."

Mark rolls over, looking away from his friend and with a low rumble he rasps, "Yes. I can."

"Addison wouldn't want you to do this."

"Well fuck Addison!" He growls, "Fuck her, and fuck everyone else."

"Mark! What's going on? You need to talk to me! I'm not moving until you do!"

Mark doesn't say anything so Derek sighs and tries a different approach. "I had a conversation with Addison, when she came back with Archer; we hashed things out, talked about a few things."

He notices that Mark's ears slightly perk at the mention of this so he continues, "I asked her why she picked you. Why it had to be you," Derek closes his eyes in memory and rubs his temple with his left hand, "She told me that you understood her. She said that she loved you. She said that you were a different guy with her."

Marks head turns to face him and Derek's excitement drives him, "She said that you were a good man to her, it was only when you weren't with her that she hated you. She said that you were perfect to her, but when she left you would self-destruct. So she couldn't trust you. That's why she aborted your baby," Mark winces slightly at the mention of it, "That's why she broke the bet."

He puts a hand on the fallen man's shoulder and concludes, "She wouldn't want you to give up, and she wouldn't give up."

Mark made a face and spat out the bitter words, "But that's exactly what she did, she gave up. She fucking gave up."

Derek sighs, knowing that all the progress he'd made would just reverse if he kept talking, so he slapped his friend on the shoulder and went out the door with a parting line, "Lexie needs you right now Mark, you need to talk to her, she needs you right now."

_There was a time when I believed,_

_That you belonged to me._

_But now I know your heart is shackled,_

_To a memory._

"Mark?" He hears the meek voice of his girlfriend and turns his head slightly; his back still mounted onto the kitchen table, his arms still flopping off of the side.

He grunts in acknowledgement and he can she her tears well up in her eyes and he almost gets up to wipe them, until he reminds himself that it is his time to morn. She should be consoling him, not the other way around, "Stop crying," he orders gruffly.

He can hear her wiping away the tears and understands that she's winding up to say something. He closes his eyes and tries to beat the aggravation out of his system. She's been there for him, kind of, she needs him. "I'm sorry," he manages to mutter, "What do you need?"

"I'm pregnant." She blurts, tears running down her face. He opens his eyes and looks towards the sky and sighs, begging for strength. Finally, for the first time in days, he rolls off the bed and manages to give her a smile.

"We're having a baby?" He asks.

She's comforted by his broken silence and she smiles at him, "Yes."

He frowns, "We should probably get married then."

She bites her lip, "I guess."

He smiles and fumbles around with the ring that she wore on her middle finger and shifted it over and smiled up at her, "We're getting married."

"Yeah," she looks at him, concerned with his sudden change in demeanor, "Are you sure this is what you want?"

He nods, "Of course, you're all I have, and you're all I need." He kisses her on the forehead and then smiles, "I'm going to go buy you a ring okay?"

She smiles unsteadily at him but she trusts him when he says that he's okay, "Okay," she says, "I'll see you soon?"

"I'll be back in an hour," he tells her.

He wanders out into the rain and runs all the way to the jewelry store. He falls apart and slides down the wall right next to the entrance and cries and cries and cries as the rain pours down on him from above.

"What did you do to me!" He shouts to the sky, "What did you do?"

He gets married ten months later, a little baby girl wheeled down the aisle before his future wife and the mother of his child. He's happy, there's a tiny hint of terror in the back of his mind but he pushes it deeper and deeper until he can no longer feel. The smile on his face is easy and simple and he knows he can do this. He knows that this will be his life and it'll be a good one.

He doesn't look over his shoulder too much anymore, but sometimes the pain is too much to bury and he finds himself searching deep into his child's hazelnut eyes for the tiniest trace of pale-green. There are days when he sees red hair and cannot function for a week, there are days when someone's laugh reaches a certain pitch and he suddenly finds himself with the need to punch something. But he has a wife who he loves and a child who is his life so he figures he's happy.

_In anger unkind words are said,_

_That make the teardrops start._

He spends the day walking is daughter down the aisle; he watches another man take from him, his baby girl and he looks at his wife who stands by his side. "Remember when we got married?" She asks, murmuring it slightly into his ear, "I always wondered if it was for me or if it was for her." She gestures to their daughter who is happily cutting the wedding cake, she sighs as she turns away from him, "I guess I'll never know will I?"

He watches her walk away and watches his girl laugh and laugh and laugh. And then he turns around and walks out. He walks out of the wedding. He walks out of his child's life. He walks out of his future and out on his wife. He keeps walking, until he reaches a cab, and he gets him and heads straight for the airport. When he lands in L.A., he rents the most expensive car he can find and he drives it hysterically in the direction he's gone so many times.

He's the only one at the graveyard at this time, and he takes a tentative step into the right direction and hovers over the tombstone that he knows by heart, that he's seen so many times. "You promised me!" He yelled into the quiet abyss, "You told me, you promised me!"

He allows his knees to crumple, and he lies there, curled up next to her somber grave and he cries.

Nobody quite knows what happened on that day, but at some point, his heart stopped beating and years and years of pain poured out of is pores, seeping into the ground where it vanished. They found him there, so they buried him there. And in the end, they lived on in death, side by side, together at last.


End file.
